Friday, May 20, 2011

Proof That Knitting Makes You Smarter, Even If You're Me

Hi, kids. I'm sitting at O'Hare airport, waiting for a flight to Oklahoma. I'll be teaching this weekend at the Sealed With a Kiss Knit Out 2011 in Guthrie, in the exalted company of Fiona Ellis and Jane Thornley.

I only just got home from my last trip–a joyful co-production of Boston's Common Cod Fiber Guild and Mind's Eye Yarn in Cambridge. The first event was a talk at M.I.T., in a terribly swish lecture hall designed with verve aplenty by Frank Gehry. We arrived to find the place crawling with equations. It looked like Einstein had inhaled too much chalkdust and sneezed violently across all twelve blackboards.

I had a few minutes of downtime before curtain, so I put on my thinking cap and got to work finishing what the class had started. Piece o' cake. Add a couple yos, balance with a few k2togs, start and end with asterisks to indicate the repeat and now you have a theory of velocity (or electricity, or gravity, or energy, or something) that also makes a really cute lace capelet.

Hearty thanks to Patience for sharing her photograph with me. I hope the nastypants meanie meanie teacher who made me cry over long division in fourth grade in front of the entire class runs across this post and has a stroke.

You are too funny! I love your additions to the equations. All of a sudden, math makes more sense to me. And, a pox on that teacher, I'm sure you would have done the long division correctly if you could have. I'm sure you weren't deliberatly disrupting the class with your math imparement!!

I saw the picture before I read your post, and my first throught was, "I think I know that lecture hall..." And it turns out, I do, or at least, I did a few years ago. I'm pretty sure I never encountered anything in it quite as entertaining as lace equations, though.

What is it with long division? I had a mortifying experience when my 3rd grade class divided into two and had a race to see which team could finish successively doing long division problems first. I was second to last. And I couldn't finish my problem. My college degree in physics is my way of telling the teacher who devised that 'fun' activity to stick it!

oh, Franklin, you are a delight! I had a "nastypants meanie meanie teacher who made me cry over long division in fourth grade in front of the entire class", too.... but your last few words were priceless! Thank you for the laugh!

I can't stop chuckling...Visions of my high school teacher seeing your equation and sputting like a motorboat. Thank heavens I have learned to put down my coffee cup when I go to your blog...Really really love you!

Well, I figured out why the Rapture is apparently not happening. That was the equation that was inputed, copied from the board last night, to direct all the ships upward. With the yo's, it just directed them to continue bobbing happily here. Life mystery solved, as per usual for knitting.

It should be some consolation that the "nastypants meanie meanie teacher who made me cry over long division in fourth grade in front of the entire class" probably couldn't understand those equations. If she could, she'd be making college students cry, rather than fourth graders...

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